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In the early hours of July 4, the Guadalupe River flooded. Heavy rainfall, enhanced by atmospheric moisture leftover from a recent tropical storm, dumped water across parts of central Texas. By 6:10 a.m., a gauge in Hunt, a community in Kerr County, measured that the river had become a 37.

Before the waters of Texas’s Guadalupe River rose more than 33 feet over the course of five hours, the National Weather Service sent out a series of alerts. The first one that included Kerr County, where most of the fatalities would ultimately take place, warned of “considerable” flood threat and went out just after 1 a.m. on July 4. It triggered push alerts on people’s phones. It set off alarms on any weather radio tuned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s frequency.

In most Superman movies (and there’ve been a fair few of them over the decades), no one else like Superman exists. The blue-and-red-costumed Kryptonian is typically unique in our world—an alien god plopped into an unfamiliar society, inspiring both reverence and fear. Not so in this latest iteration, the character’s first solo movie in 12 years.

The story unfolds so rapidly that it can all seem, at a glance, preordained. After transferring to Columbia last fall, as Chungin “Roy” Lee tells it, he used AI to cheat his way through school, used AI to cheat his way through internship interviews at Amazon and Meta—he received offers from both—and in the winter broadcasted his tool on social media. He was placed on probation, suspended, and, more keen on AI than education, dropped out this spring to found a start-up.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Remember when the United States engaged in an act of war against a country of some 90 million people by sending its B-2 bombers into battle? No? Well, you can be forgiven for letting it slip your mind; after all, it was more than two weeks ago.

The Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” will reduce Medicaid spending by about $800 billion over the next decade by kicking some 8 million Americans off the program’s rolls. That is, if you listen to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the hospital industry, or the basic intuition that any plan to spend drastically less money on giving health care to poor people will result in those people ceasing to have health care.

That’s it! I loud quit! I have had it with these so-called workplace trends. First there was “quiet quitting,” when an employee … works only during work hours and puts in only the precise amount of work required to keep their job. And now there’s “micro-retirement,” a new trend of not working for a week or two weeks every 18 months, sometimes while employed, sometimes between jobs.